1910-11 M116 Sporting Life Honus Wagner (Pastel Background) PSA NM-MT 8....

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Population five, none superior!

1910-11 M116 Sporting Life Honus Wagner (Pastel Background) PSA NM-MT 8. It's the most famous portrait in the full history of baseball card collecting, but admittedly this is not the specific issue that established it as such. This same photographic portrait from the studio of acclaimed Dead Ball Era portraitist Carl Horner soared to superstardom through its appearance on the short-printed T206 release, earning "Holy Grail" status for its combination of rarity, value and the iconic status of its subject.

So while this contemporary fraternal twin of that iconic creation by the American Tobacco Company might not enjoy the same A-List celebrity, it does share a similar degree of scarcity, with the full population at leading card grading service PSA still short of triple figures. This is one of only five examples to share the highest rung of the PSA grading ladder, making it technically rarer than any T206 Wagner graded below VG 3.

As the elite assessment from the graders at PSA would suggest, a search for faults in this eleven-decades-old relic is no easy task, as the colors are bright, registration crisp, centering well balanced and corners remarkably sharp. Even the advertising design on verso is boldly applied. Any collector sophisticated enough to pursue ownership of this card will know that the Dead Ball Era provides very few entries in the upper quarter of the grading spectrum, and Wagner stands tall in the pantheon of that early 20th century baseball generation. It's an absolutely majestic trading card by any metric of measurement. Graded PSA NM-MT 8.

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